Kings copier
This is an old Kings Copier, from around 1920. It's an old system for doing copies, a manual Cyclostyle, so to say.
It comes in a carton box, it seems a shoes box.
Inside there is the cyclostyle, this roller, with an handle, covered with absorbent material, to absorb the ink. It's perforated inside so when you press it, the ink in excess can pass through the holes without dirtying the paper.
There are three packages with the waxed paper the prepare the stencils, a brush, for applying the ink on the roller, and a printing plate to prepare the stencil.
It's a British patent mimeograph, also the brush is made in England.
At those times if you wanted to do a copy of a piece of writing, the most common system was a mimeograph. There were big mimeographs like the Gestetner, but also portable ones like this. Of course this one is much more simpler to use.
But both work in the same way. The mimeograph rely on a master page, the matrix, that is a paper covered of wax.
When you write on this paper with a stylus or with a typewriter, you remove the wax making the sheet of paper permeable to the ink at that point. So you can use this matrix to do many copies.
The manual tells that with this mimeograph you can do around 400 copies from one stencil with an inking, at the speed of 60 copies per minute.
In this video there is a complete presentation of this device, and I also print a copy with it.
Here some documents about it, stained with ink.
A short guide for this device
